Birst Launched as First On-Demand, Automated Business Intelligence Solution

Fast, Flexible Analysis Now Easily Available for Customers Large and Small – with Accounts Starting at Free

SAN FRANCISCO–Birst, an on-demand business intelligence (BI) solution, was launched today by Success Metrics. Birst is a complete, end-to-end BI solution that solves the two greatest challenges of BI: cost and complexity. A fully automated solution, Birst allows users to go from data to dashboards in minutes. Anyone can get started with a free account by signing up online at www.birst.com. As a result, the benefits of BI are finally available to a much broader audience, including individual professionals and small/medium businesses.

Birst is offered by Success Metrics, a leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions.

“Birst represents a new era in business intelligence,” said Brad Peters, CEO of Success Metrics. “With Birst, BI is now affordable, easy-to-use, and fast. It is now possible for individuals and companies of all sizes to enjoy the power and benefits of BI.”

As a general BI solution, Birst handles any type of data, including finance, operations, marketing, customer service, and sales information. It also accepts columnar data held in csv, Access databases, or Excel files. Fully automated, it’s easy and quick to get started with Birst. Within a few minutes of signing up and uploading data, users can be creating their own reports and analysis. Birst even creates some dashboard reports for users automatically; these automatic dashboards are known as Quick Dashboards.

“Strong demand from business users continues to fuel the emergence and growth of SaaS Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and BI solutions. The ease with which users can now acquire, implement and use these solutions creates a new world of possibilities for those without the IT resources needed for more complex offerings,” said Howard Dresner, noted author and well known expert in BI and EPM. “It also creates a large and growing market opportunity for those vendors that effectively serve these needs.”

During its beta availability over the past few months, Birst has been used by individual professionals, small businesses, and medium size organizations.

“I have been using Birst in conjunction with my Salesforce.com SFA application,” said Graham Gunst, a professional at marketing software firm Nimblefish. “It allows me to easily analyze my client base, visually understand opportunity progressions through the pipeline, and quickly see where greater opportunities lie. I have been impressed with how easy it is to set up and refresh the data, as well as the depth of reports I am able to quickly generate.”

Birst also announced partnerships with RightNow Technologies, a leading provider of on-demand customer relationship management solutions (CRM) and Redtail, an on-demand CRM solution for brokerage firms.

“We have been using Birst for our RightNow customer service data and have been amazed at how quickly and easily we can analyze the drivers of our business,” said Jay Kong, Senior Manager of Customer Support at a Fortune 1000 computer hardware peripherals manufacturer. “Birst gives us a far greater understanding of our business and the decisions we can make to improve our service levels and profitability.”

Birst is now generally available. Individual users can get started immediately with Birst Free, a cost-free account that includes up to 10 megabytes of account size and can be shared with 5 additional users. Birst Basic and Birst Professional expand the available features, account size, and number of users, and cost $99 and $199 a month, respectively. Birst Groups and Birst Enterprise are also available.

About Birst

Birst is the only on-demand, automated business intelligence solution, bringing the benefits of fact-based decision making to a much broader audience by making BI affordable, fast, and easy to use. Delivered by Success Metrics, the leading provider of software-as-a-service analytical solutions, Birst is designed to support a wide range of customers — from individuals to groups and entire companies, so that everyone can benefit from greater insight into their business.

For more information, please visit www.birst.com. Screenshots of the solution are available at www.birst.com/media.